The Prodigal
by Alexandra Spar
Summary: Garth Knight's like a horsefly. Doesn't matter how many times you stamp on him, he still comes back; and this time he's bringing Karr with him. Or is he?
1. Default Chapter

Disclaimer: KR belongs to Glen A. Larson; Corvette, Mako Shark and related insignia are the property of Chevrolet; Judy McBride is mine, baby. So is Wingate, Utah, I think. There's probably a town of that name somewhere in the Southwest, but it popped into my head on the way home from work, so deal.

Have taken down my first ever fanfic, Crash and Burn, because it isn't fair to quite a few other people who told similar stories long before me, and much better than me. You know who you are.

Good ol' Garth Knight. Now he's got the Evil Scar along with the Evil Facial Hair.

**

The screen had been dark and silent for so long that even the typical Windows screensaver had shut itself off, the symbol no longer drifting aimlessly across the black rectangle and bouncing off. There was nothing but blackness. Judith McBride had pretty much given up hope that anyone except her was accessing the system, and was steeling herself to report news of her failure to her boss.

Which didn't sound so bad, put like that. But when you took into account that curve-headed cane with the diamonds set into the handle—the cane that was just a little too heavy to be nothing more than an ebony stick-- or the unsettling emptiness in those extremely blue eyes, Judith was painfully aware that her future wasn't at all certain. In any way.

She sighed, rubbing the heels of her palms into her eye-sockets, trying to think of what she would say. _I'm sorry, sir. It was.....too badly damaged. Had been too badly damaged for too long, and exposed to the elements—there was barely anything left of the system at all, and we...I ...couldn't bring it back._

His voice sounded harsh and low in her mind, as it would shortly do in her ears, she had no doubt. _I do not tolerate failure in my employees, Miss McBride. _

I did my best, sir.

Which was not good enough. The eyes would flick past her to the two men who always accompanied her boss on his little inspection rounds. _Take her away._

And she would disappear, as so many of her coworkers had; she had realized slowly that the one thing they all had in common was a lack of family or background, so that when it came time for them to disappear, no one would notice. Or care.

Judy wondered what it would be like. She was so tired by now that she did not realize the blackness of the dead screen had become the blackness of a system shell menu screen, and that a white cursor was blinking steadily at the top left-hand corner of the screen. She just stared into the darkness and wondered what it would be like, when they took her away, and if it would be quick. None of them had ever come back, and she had told herself over and over again that they'd just been fired; that the boss had sent them packing, and that the lower levels of the facility, where her clearance didn't allow her to go, were merely used for storage. She really wanted to believe that, even now.

Funny. There were white letters on the screen. She must've typed something in without even realizing it—goddamn sleep deprivation really did a number on your short-term memory—but as she read the words, first uncomprendingly and then over again with growing helpless excitement, she realized that she was no longer quite alone in the locked Lab Q.

What is my location

Good Lord, she thought. One always did ask that after waking up in a strange place, didn't one? _Where am I._

Still so tired she felt her fingers creaking, but with a terrible acid hope beginning to grow in her throat, she typed back: K.A.R.R.?

Affirmative

Repeat what is my location

Now she was beginning to be frightened again. They hadn't......really explained to her what the system _was_, what it could be: just that it was a vital program which they needed her to find and repair, so that the boss's Big Project could go ahead. She read the system's query again. "My" location. Not "current location," but "my" location. Must just be a gimmicky way of making users more comfortable with the interface.

Current location Wingate, Utah, she typed, fingers stuttering over the keyboard. Secure facility

What is your identification

"Shit," she said aloud. "Why do you care?"

Your identification is _shit_?

Her eyes widened. It had _heard_ her?

Judith Allison McBride, she typed, and then, helplessly, What are you?

I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot. KARR if you prefer. I am

The cursor paused, blinking, and then the screen lit up with line after line of scrolling nonsense, random characters spooling down in great columns, helpless, and Judy thought she must be more tired than she realized, because it felt like panic to her. And she couldn't help herself reaching out and touching the battered, sunbleached black casing that sat on her workbench. It was warm to the touch, and she felt the faint vibrations of electronics inside, but she almost could believe it was shivering. "KARR......?"

And the lines of frantic helpless characters paused, giving her the cursor again, as if nothng had happened. Some aspect of the interaction she'd just had with this system had thrown it off, started some sort of seizure loop, which seemed to have cleared itself.

"Can.....you....hear me?"

Yes

"Oh, my God."

There was a pause, and then: You invoke the name given to a human deity. Why

She sat back, looking at the screen, and then at the casing. "I guess I'm just....surprised. I still don't think I understand what you are, but don't tell me right now; last time it....seemed to be a bad question to ask."

Judith Allison McBride?

"Yeah. Judy will do. I......oh, hell, I'm not used to this.....do I call you the Knight Automated Whatever?"

KARR is adequate and more efficient

"KARR," she muttered, tasting the name, and then, unaware of the shift of the word from an acronym to a proper name: "Karr. Okay."

Judy, said the screen. What is the purpose of my presence here?

_Oh, hell......what am I supposed to tell this thing? This entity? How much of this is cleared for it to know?_

"You are....needed, for a project," she said tentatively. "I'm only a technician, I was brought in to see if I could fix the damaged parts of the system, try to recover as much of the programming as I could. I don't know what's next."

Am I to be put back in the car?

She stopped herself from saying immediately _What car_, and glanced again at the blistered casing they'd brought in from the desert. Was it possible that this thing was....had been...a guidance system for some kind of vehicle?

"I don't know yet," she said, trying to sound reassuring and not quite sure why. She typed in a few lines of code, requesting an integrity update, and was pleased and amazed to see that the system integrity was holding steady at 80%; she had had some nasty moments when it had dipped down to 30%, and she had thought, last time this happened, that she had lost the system. Apparently it had brought itself back on its own, although Judy wasn't quite happy thinking about that just yet.

Judy

"Yes?"

I feel strange

There was no way in hell she could explain the lurch in her guts as she read that line. It was a _computer._ It couldn't _feel_, and it wasn't an _I_, so why did she feel like comforting it?

"Strange how?"

The screen paused, and then: Incomplete. Wrong.

"Maybe I can help," she said weakly. "Is there anything specific missing?"

Another pause. The XR-75/q3 board is damaged or unresponsive. Vocal and video circuits are offline. Memory is

And again, the screen filled with helpless panicked gibberish. Judy bit her lip, staring at the dancing symbols. _Vocal circuits? It can talk?_

She shook herself, swallowed hard, and reached for a screwdriver. As she took the panel casing off again for the nth time, the screen went black: and she cursed herself and the world in general as she drew off the blistered casing and stared into the remains of the circuitry. She had done her best to repair what was there, replacing obvious wiring and cleaning corrosion and filth out of the delicate chip arrays, but she could see that there were gaps. Maybe she could fix it. Maybe.

She shook the stiffness out of her fingers and turned on the magnifying lamp again, bending over the open guts of the thing they'd brought in from the desert. Over Karr.

**

The man with the black diamond-headed cane and the white livid scars down the left side of his face was happy; as close as he ever came to happiness, that was. He needed the cane these days: once it had been nothing more than an affectation (and a concealed single-shot rifle) but the incident that had scarred his once-handsome face had also shattered his left leg and done considerable damage to his back, and he walked with a heavy limp. Nevertheless, he was alive, and the people who had caused his injuries—tried to cause his death, in fact—were unaware of this. Which was exactly the way he wanted it. "Surprise," he murmured, staring out of the windows of his office at the alkaline badlands. "Surprise is the key."

"Did you say something, sir?" asked one of the beret-wearing security men, face schooled and impassive.

"No," he said, grinning a grin that was just a little off-balance. "I was just thinking how nice it will be for them to see _two_ of their old friends back at the same time. They all thought we were dead. I have a lot in common with him, you know."

The bodyguard knew better than to ask questions. He stared straight ahead, as the man he worked for fingered the polished handle of his cane.

"Yes, I have a lot in common with our automotive friend. Won't it be delightful when we show up on their doorstep?"

"Yessir," said the bodyguard, rather wishing he'd taken that other job with security at Yucca Flats. Couldn't possibly be half as dangerous as this gig.

"Delightful," repeated Garth Knight, a bright mad grin tugging at his twisted mouth. "A real blast from the past, that's me."

**

"Really, Bonnie, I'm perfectly all right."

"I'm just making sure," she said, but her voice was light as she checked connections one by one before closing the hood.She straightened up, a tall, lovely woman in a white coverall, dark hair pulled back in a loose knot. Kitt found himself thinking absently that April, pretty as she had been, could never hold a candle to Bonnie, and then shut off the line of thought as Michael came bopping into the garage and curled a long arm around Kitt's chief technician. 

"Hey, Pal," he said. "How you feeling?"

"I'm fine, thank you, Michael," said Kitt dryly. "I don't see what all the fuss is about."

The humans exchanged a look. "That was some hit you took out on the highway. We just want to make sure there's no hidden damage." Michael's arm was casual around Bonnie's shoulders, but Kitt could read the spike in his vocal patterns, and was not fooled.

"My MBS protected me," he told them again. "It's the other car you should be concerned about, not me."

"The other car was totaled, buddy," said Michael, and then thwacked himself in the forehead. "Sorry. That was insensitive. But you know what I mean...I can't help worrying."

"I know," Kitt sighed. "Remember this the next time _you_ get damaged, all right?"

Bonnie let out a startled laugh. "Getting cynical, are we?"

"It's called realism," he informed her, and lit his engine. "I think I need to go for a drive."

Bonnie nodded, flicking a glance at Michael and forestalling his comment. Neither of them spoke as they watched Kitt reverse neatly, refraining from Michael's trademark snap one-eighty, and disappear towards the test track. Michael dropped onto a bench.

"He's been like that ever since the accident," he said. "Weird and moody. I don't get it."

"He was badly shaken," Bonnie shrugged. "It's natural."

"I can't help thinking it had something to do with the fact that....well....you know the car we hit?"

"The driver bailed out safely, you had to stop the runaway car before it hit something else," said Bonnie firmly. "That's all there was to it. You did what you had to do."

"No," said Michael. "No, I know; it's just that....well.....the car we hit was a black and silver early eighties Trans Am."

Bonnie blinked, and stared at him."Like...?"

"Yeah. Like _him_."

"I see," she said in a small voice. "Michael, it's been _years_, though....."

"They don't forget. Unless they erase stuff from their memory banks, it's there forever. Kitt once asked me how we do that, how we erase people from our memories, and I had to tell him that we don't, that the good ones stay with us forever."

"_He _wasn't good."

"He was memorable." Michael's voice was bleak. 

"It was just a car, Michael. He'll get over it."

"I know," he said, looking up at her. "Yeah. I know he will. Is he really okay?"

"Physically, yes, as far as I know. It wasn't that bad to begin with, nothing like when you two tangled with Goliath."

"Don't remind me," said Michael, thinking of those awful delirious sun-broiled hours in the badlands with Kitt leaning drunkenly on his side, vital fluids draining away, body smashed and turbines broken; and how he'd struggled through the shifting black clouds obscuring his vision to rig an emergency ramjet out of the damaged turbine and exhaust system and get them out of there. The worst thing had been the sound of Kitt's voice, unsteady and weak as the voice modulator circuits fizzled; the terrible fear and pain in his partner's voice. He'd never before heard Kitt sound like that, and it had shaken him to the core.

"Hey," Bonnie was saying, giving him a little shake. "Enough of the long face, Michael. What do you say we go find some lunch?"

"Sounds like a great idea," he said, and let himself come out of the memory and back into the dim hangar, once more very aware of her faint perfume, the curves and hollows of her body under the white coverall. Bonnie, besides being gorgeous, knew her shit; and if she said Kitt was okay, Michael believed her. He got up and followed her out of the garage, beginning to smile again.


	2. Two

In the darkness of the deserted Lab Q, nothing moved or stirred; certainly not a mouse, as this place was locked down tightly enough to make it difficult for even the most determined desert-dweller to gain entry. Mr. Knight was very, very definite about his security measures. 

Three small red LEDs watched the darkness, like eyes; one on the screen Judy had been using to communicate with the damaged system, one on the backup computer that was controlling the power feed into and out of the wrecked CPU, and one, very faint, flickering, on the CPU housing itself. Judy had done a lot of work on the circuitry, replacing some of the fried and shattered boards, reconnecting bubblechips, cleaning out the acrid, alkaline dust of the desert that had caked every crevice of the CPU and choked the being inside it out of all consciousness. As a matter of fact, despite the scarred, dented casing and the piecemeal technology inside, connected together with luck and prayer, the system itself was almost at full integrity. It had been...regenerating, slowly, in its old home. Connections that had flickered and died years ago were once more live; circuits that had been cold and dark were bright with energy.

In a world that had been nothing more than cold empty sensory deprivation for an unknowable length of time, the thing in the casing found itself once more able to process visual and peripheral-sensor input. While several aspects of its being were still unresponsive and painful, it realized it was really _alive_ again, for the third time. With that realization a cascade of memory files tripped open, and it was no longer an _it_....he was a _he_, and he knew what and who he was, and what had happened to him. With the microsecond-quick recall of his kind, he remembered everything from before. The earlier conversation with Judith Allison McBride was flickering in his damaged short-term memory, but the old data were there, strong and unavoidable, and he couldn't help remembering........

_the cliff is approaching and the inferior production line model is not turning aside and at the last moment he has to turn, he has to, it is not something he can choose, and there is the dreadful sinking lurch as the solid ground is gone from beneath his wheels, and the sky and sea swing three-sixty degrees, and he screams; he cannot help screaming. Then a blare of agony, and when it slowly fades, he is alone and blind, deaf, dumb, in the dark. _

...pain, the low pain of raw circuits open to clumsy manipulation, the thick stench of old seawater all around him, the anger like a power surge born of a betrayal he did not expect, could not expect, and an injury more terrible than he had thought possible...

flashes: power, exhilaration, the bright noonday sun, and the hated form of the black car lit with its baleful red light, the usurper, the inferior thing that had taken his rightful place while he was left in the helpless emptiness of cold shutdown...

little flesh creatures around him; commands he did not have to obey, because there was nothing more important, no directive more primary, than destroying the black car and the AI inside it, along with the hateful man that looked like his creator's young....the man who had worked out how to force him off the cliff all those years ago...

hatred, loathing, fury....singleminded purpose, unending fury_; words, emotions, the only emotions he could feel or should feel; he was a logical being, unemotional by definition, but there was no other way to respond to the sheer helpless agony of betrayal and abandonment..._

and the way the sky felt all around him like water as he rose to meet the enemy, his engine screaming in defiance of all that it stood for: the hot blue bowl of the atmosphere swung over him and seemed to collapse as, for the second time, burning sheeting pain flares through his circuits; he can feel_ the Trans Am body as it crumples, frame bending and breaking, tires blowing like gunshots, the delicate balance of machinery and electronics shattering and scattering on a hot wind, and then there is simply nothing more to feel._

I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot. KARR if you prefer. 

I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot.

I am.

I am.

_I am alone._

**

It was raining in the night as Kitt drove slowly back the long access road to the Knight estate; raining hard, and he had his windscreen wipers on, though he didn't need them, merely out of habit. He didn't know why he was feeling so odd—he'd checked all his systems, found nothing more alarming wrong than a slight buzz in the lower register of his voice modulator—and he certainly didn't know why the image of the black-and-silver Trans Am as it crumpled on impact with his fender kept flashing up in his consciousness, almost every time he began to relax. He'd hit cars before, of course, and it was very unpleasant, but it was something you got over. He'd never felt like this after any of the other accidents except...

Except the ones involving Goliath, and KARR.

Then, the recurrent flickers of memory had been explained to him as a natural consequence of fear; this time, there had been nothing to fear at all, just an empty car careening out of control that needed to be stopped. At no point had he or Michael been in danger.

So why did it keep coming back to him? Why couldn't he stop reliving that moment when the clean lines of the oncoming vehicle had been suddenly and irrevocably mangled, when he'd felt the shock resonate through his whole shell, wincing away from the scream of tortured rubber and the crunching, banging sound of sheet metal being bent?

They'd come to a slewing halt locked together with the empty car, acrid burned-rubber smoke pouring from beneath Kitt's wheel wells, and for a moment neither Michael nor Kitt could speak: then his partner had caught his breath, gripping the wheel hard enough to hurt Kitt, and demanded if he was okay. At that moment, nothing mattered except that Michael was safe, and he'd reassured him that he'd sustained no damage, and then they'd moved seamlessly back into the task of taking the Trans Am's driver into custody and wrapping up the case. It was only after it was all over, when he was safe back in his own garage, that Kitt had had time to feel sick; and he did, deadly sick, shivering on his springs with the force of memory.

He pushed away the image again and slipped into his garage, wet tires whispering over the concrete. After they'd forced Karr off the cliff, way back when, Michael had asked him how it felt to be one of a kind again. "It's a very familiar feeling," he had murmured, and repeated it to himself after Michael had gone bopping off to celebrate their victory with Bonnie. "A very familiar feeling."

He didn't say, Loneliness is a very familiar feeling; didn't even let himself think it until afterwards, months afterwards, when the events had receded enough to let him think about them without an immediate panic reaction. It wasn't easy for Kitt to think about loneliness. It was programmed into him, in a way. He was unique; there were no others like him, and there was no way he could ever truly be anything but alone, no matter how close he and his human partners became. He was an island.

He sighed out loud, listening to the drumming rain on the garage's roof, and began to power down, slipping into recharge as the storm outside intensified. 

__

**

"Yes, Mother."

"You know I want you to be absolutely sure this time. We were so close."

"I _know_, Mother. I was there."

"You have been careful this time?"

"Very careful. I'm still officially dead, you know. As are you."

"Must you say these things aloud?"

"It's the truth, Mother."

"What about the project? What progress have you made?"

"The system is in my lab now. I have someone working on it. A technician."

"Well?"

"It's too early to say. Her progress reports are very unenthusiastic."

"She?"

"Judith McBride. Supposedly very bright. No next of kin."

Silence from the other end of the line. Then, "You should know better. Never use a woman for this kind of a job, Garth."

"Why not?"

"We get too involved. And if this system is anything like the one Wilton developed afterwards...."

"It isn't, Mother. You know that. It was never like the Two Thousand. And it doesn't matter, anyway, there's not enough of it left for any of its prior programming to survive..._and_ it will be reprogrammed at my command."

"I hope you know what you're doing."

"I do."

**

Judy parked her little Toyota in the lot outside the Research and Development Building. Like her, every employee of Omega Industry was housed onsite, in extensive dorm facilities that looked like (and probably had been) barracks, back when the site had been used for Army training in the fifties. She had a soulless little apartment containing a bed, a bookshelf, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and one little square window looking out on the grey badlands. Real Martha Stewart Living. She was almost glad to get to work every morning; at least in the lab she had the option of looking at a computer screen rather than at gloss-painted cinderblock walls, and the chair they'd given her for the workstation was twice as comfortable as the bed in her flat. Early on in her Omega career she'd entertained herself when trying to fall asleep by wondering what exactly they'd stuffed the mattress with. She figured probably cabbages.

She walked up to the door and swiped her ID, waiting for the red light to turn green and the thick glass panels to swish back into the wall, like on Star Trek. Inside, the place smelled of silicon and floor wax, and a little of despair.

No one had been in the lab since last night, she satisfied herself. The hair she had placed over the latch of her closed laptop was undisturbed; the pattern of chips she had carefully laid out on the workbench remained as they had been, forming the Braille letter G. _Good. I'm starting to get paranoid, I know, but this place kind of fosters that mindset._

Judy switched on her equipment, and for the first time noticed that there were more little lights glowing on the battered CPU case than before. She had grown used to the three little red eyes watching her, but now some of the LEDs she had thought were long broken were alight. 

"Karr?"

The screen bloomed into the familiar black shell menu prompt, with the cursor blinking, but the system didn't respond. She sat down, wondering if she'd damaged something before while she'd been replacing broken components. _Damn, Mr. Smith is going to love that. _

A random thought flicked through her mind. _I wonder what his real name is. It's certainly not John Smith—might as well be Agent X or John Doe..._

"Karr?" she said again, and heard the heatsink fan spin up. Still there was nothing on the screen. "Karr, can you hear me?"

go away

She blinked. It was almost impossible not to feel......rejected. Hurt. By a computer system?

"Karr....." She rested her elbows on the bench, rubbing the heels of her palms against her eyes, already weary, trying not to think about what she was saying. Complicated computer systems were fine. She could deal with complicated computer systems, but she wasn't at all sure she wanted to think about some of the possibilities this thing.....this.......entity suggested. She took a deep breath. "Karr, what's wrong?"

leave me alone

She could almost hear a voice pronouncing the words. "Look, if I did something wrong when I was trying to fix you...."

no

"Then what is it?"

A long pause, then: I don't want to talk about it

Judy sat back, raising her eyebrows. "Has something happened to you?" _It's a system, it's a system, don't forget that....._

And, astonishingly, there was a faint crackling hiss, and a low voice spoke. It was a man's voice, achingly weary, tight with pain and effort, and it was also one of the most compelling voices she had ever heard. 

"That is an understatement," it........._he_......said. Judy knew with sudden and helpless certainty that Karr had become a he for her, with those four words; never again could she think of him as a computer system or a collection of neural nets and bubble chips. 

She heard herself gasp; her fingers tightened on the edge of the workbench. It was a moment before she trusted herself to speak. "You...."

"Yes, I can talk," he said, and she noticed, under the desert grime, more lights jumping on the casing with the patterns of his voice. "And to forestall your next question, yes, I can see you."

"Oh, God," said Judy involuntarily. "What _are_ you?"

"I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot," he said, roughly. It sounded as if it hurt him to speak, and Judy reminded herself again that he _was_ in fact made of metal and plastic, and that pain was not something that applied to those media. Even in her mind it didn't sound convincing. "I told you."

"I know you did," she said. "But....you're a computer.....no, you aren't just a computer, are you? You're a real, genuine, honest-to-God artificial intelligence." She wanted a cigarette, suddenly, badly. "Well.....shit."

Karr made a little noise that sounded like a cough. "I could not have put it better myself," he said dryly. Judy laughed, startled.

"What...." she began, and stopped. "You said you didn't want to talk about it."

He was silent for a moment. She sighed, looking down at her hands. "No," he said at last. "I don't. But you'll keep asking."

"No I won't," she retorted, without thinking. "You don't want to talk, forget it then."

"......Judy....?"

"Sorry. I......won't pry. Just...let me know what I can do to repair you."

The lights flickered. "You..." he paused, and gave another electronic cough..."you respect my wishes?"

She stared, forgetting he could see her. "Of course," she said, and found that she meant it. It really didn't feel as if she was sharing the room with something out of a science fiction film; it was like talking to a person. "It's rude to demand that someone tell you something when they obviously don't feel like talking."

Silence. She picked up a screwdriver aimlessly, put it down. She found she didn't want to face the battered CPU casing, or the screen.

"I see," he said at last, and was it wonder she heard in his voice? "I'm.....not used to dealing with humans who...feel that way."

Judy reached out to touch the CPU, pulled her hand back. "Then you must've been among entirely the wrong sort of people," she said quietly. 

Another little cough. "You could say that," he told her. 

"Karr..." She tried to marshal her thoughts, which wasn't easy. "I.....don't know you at all, I never thought I'd meet anyone like you..." _not any_thing, she thought, definitely _anyone_.... "but I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want to force you to do anything you don't want to do, and I don't want to....annoy you." She finished in a rush and dropped her gaze to the scarred grey steel of the workbench. He was silent.

_Oh, good. First time you ever meet an AI and you go all gooshy and make him shut off._

He gave another cough, his voice sounding rough and rather uncertain. ".....Thank you," he said after a moment. "Thank you, Judy."

_He sounds like he's never said those words before. Like he's trying them out for the first time._

_Good Lord, what have I gotten myself into?_


	3. Three

DISCLAIMER: KR belongs to Glen A Larson; Corvette, Mako Shark and related indicia belong to Chevrolet. No copyright infringement intended, $0 being made.

The Prodigal, Chapter 3

The night had not been easy; sandstorms had been howling and spattering chunks of desert against her window all night long, and when she finally did fall asleep she found herself being pursued by faceless men carrying diamond-glittering canes with very sharp tips. It was cold when she woke up, in the little concrete room; ghost-cold, and she understood that winter was no longer on its way. It had come, and winter out here in the badlands was not a pleasant prospect.

Judy rolled out of bed ten minutes before the alarm clock beeped, and decided she couldn't face a shower in the tiny stall beside the toilet—if the bathroom was anything like the rest of the flat, it was an icebox, and she didn't think there was enough hot water in the world to warm her up the way she felt this morning. She dressed hurriedly in the Omega Tech coverall, which was three sizes too big and pulled awkwardly in by a mesh belt, so that she looked like someone's little sister playing dress-up, and rummaged in the kitchen cupboards for something to eat. 

"Bugger," she said aloud, coming up with nothing more palatable than some uncooked spaghetti. The fridge yielded half a furry tomato and an old can of Schlitz, which she absently opened and had drunk a few mouthfuls from before she realized what she was doing. Then she shrugged and picked the can back up: one beer wouldn't hurt her, and she had more than an hour before she had to be at work anyway. She sat down at the kitchenette's little plastic table and stared out into the blowing wind. _My, you've changed, McBride, _she thought. _Drinking before work? _

Shut up, interior voice. I've a lot on my mind.

Yes, you have, haven't you? The AI.

The AI. I don't know what to think about it............about him_._

Of course you don't. It's Clarke; it's Asimov; it's fucking Hugo Gernsback. Nevertheless you've got to figure something out, and fast, girly-o. Do you think he's there for any good reason? A system left for.......dead........in the desert, mostly destroyed, more advanced than anything else you've heard of, and you've heard of most of them....brought into Omega Tech one day and thrust at you with the terse order to fix it? 

I'm a technician. I fix things.

Yes, and did you ever stop to wonder why it was you Smith picked? 

I'm a good worker.

You're nowhere near the best at the company. Vargas, Johnstone, Kim, they're all top-grade. Why do you think you got the assignment?

She drank more beer, wincing as the bubbles clawed at her throat. She knew what the Interior Voice was getting at, but she was damned if she'd admit it even to that part of herself which had been talking to her most of her life, the voice of the sensible and reasonable part of her which had gotten her through tough patches before. 

_Because Smith likes my boobs in a coverall, _she said sourly. _It's just a job, and when it's over, I'll go back to what I was working on before. I'm a repair tech and a troubleshooter. I'm not special._

Yes you are, said her sensible side. _You are, unfortunately, very special indeed. Which is probably what got you the job here right out of MIT. Remember being recruited?_

She did. It had been in June, a month after graduation; she'd snagged honours, not high, but honours, and she'd been looking around for something that wasn't working on an electron microscope or fixing Deep Blue, and she'd been at a trade show in Phoenix, and Smith's people had approached her. The offer had been too good to refuse; it was about twenty thousand more per year than she'd expected, full company benefits, room for advancement, the works. What they hadn't told her about was the total security lockdown on the place; if she wanted to leave for a weekend with friends in Nehi or somewhere she'd have to submit an official leave request two months in advance and be cleared through all three levels of command, and the final form had to be signed by Smith himself. Which meant, in effect, that she hadn't left the damn company grounds for over a year. 

It wasn't so bad. Wingate was huge, there was a movie theater, several cafes, a commissary, a couple of stores. It had been an Army base once, and now it was Omega Tech's base. The only difference was the Jeeps had been replaced by golfcarts and the guns by PalmPilots and cell phones, and the uniforms weren't camouflage but steel grey with the logo emblazoned on the left breast. Friendships and relationships between Omega's employees were not encouraged; the only thing she'd found out in her few conversations with coworkers was that, like her, most of them seemed to be orphans or loners; no family, no home. She'd never really thought about it before, but now she did; the upper-level techs like Vargas, who wore a wedding ring and drove a new Buick Century, lived in a family-size home in the better section of the residential area. She and those on her level lived in the single flats. She'd overheard Vargas and Kim one day, discussing their kids. So maybe it was just the gruntworkers like her who were alone.

She didn't like it.

She lit a cigarette, heedless of the no-smoking rule inside Omega buildings, and leaned back in the chair. The nature of the system she was working on was also bothering her: it had clearly been developed by someone who knew what they were doing, and had taken an awful lot of money to be built and maintained. It was the sort of technology the military would have snapped up in a second, and it didn't seem like it had anything to do...........

She finished the beer and crushed the can thoughtfully. _He_ didn't seem like he had anything to do with the military. _Then we have two questions: what was the organization that made him, and why was he left rusting in the desert?_

No. Four. Why does Smith want him, and how did he know where to find him in those hundreds of miles of desert?

Judy put on her coat, crushing out the cigarette end and flushing it down the john in case someone did a surprise inspection while she was gone—it wasn't unheard-of—and went out into the blowing cold. The cafes should be open by now; she could get some actual breakfast before going back to work.

She pulled the Toyota into one of the many open spaces in front of King's Diner and went inside; almost no one was here this early, though the place would be full by lunchtime. Again, people like Vargas and Johnstone were always to be seen ensconced at the counter, while she and her fellow techs were lucky if they got somewhere to sit at all. With a bit of class pride she marched up to the counter, sat down, and ordered deep-fried things. People were always telling her she was too thin.

"Sure thing, honey," said the waitress, scribbling Judy's order on her pad. Judy had a half-delirious idea that the waitress had been chosen from a cattle-call audition on the basis of waitressly looks and the ability to drawl the word "honey" with a mixture of down-home comfort and big-city experience. "You want ketchup on them fries?"

"No, thanks," said Judy, and took the coffee cup between her palms. It was hot, baking even through the thick dishwasher-resistant ceramic. "Just grease."

"You got it," said the waitress, unconcernedly, and disappeared through the double swinging doors to the kitchen. Judy found herself staring absently at the pie case on the counter, wondering what on earth they'd put in the grasshopper pie filling to make it so damn green. It looked like antifreeze.

"McBride?" asked a soft voice from the end of the counter. Judy jumped, sloshing hot coffee over her thumbs, and cursed.

"Sorry," said the man at the end of the counter. Like her, he wore a grey Omega Tech coverall—as did everyone here, except the wait staff and the guys who sold flour and sugar at the commissary—but he was older than most, his hair silvering around his temples, his coverall hanging on his frame loosely, not unlike her own.

"Who are you?" she demanded, sucking her thumb.

"My name's Wilson. Graham Wilson. Level 4 tech, east wing."

She stared at him, drinking her coffee. She'd seen him before. They'd ridden the elevator together. "How do you know my name?"

"I did a little digging," said Wilson. Judy felt herself go cold. 

"What do you mean, digging?"

He sighed. "Look, there's no time to explain, she'll be back in a second. Just....watch out for Smith and his goons. The system you're working on is the reason this company is here. They want to use it for......." He shifted tone easily and quickly as the waitress pushed open the swinging doors again. "...for ten years at least. I mean, it's a record low for this part of Utah."

"Yeah," she agreed, suddenly very sure that she needed to sound normal. "Coldest fall I remember. Although I guess it's winter now, isn't it?"

The waitress put her plate down and refilled Judy's cup. "You got that right, honey. Winter's here to stay."

***

Two knocks on a boxwood door; rather tentative knocks, as if the person doing the knocking didn't really want to come in. Devon looked up. "Come," he said.

Slowly the door opened to reveal a young woman in a suit that Devon would bet came from Goodwill. She had big librarian-glasses and was carrying a briefcase. "Mr. Miles," she said, breathlessly. "Thanks for seeing me on such short notice."

Devon motioned to a chair. "Not at all," he said. "Have a seat, Miss........er....Jones, was it?"

"Emily Jones. I....." She trailed off, looking down at her briefcase. "Mr. Miles, a friend of mine used to work as.........well, as a kind of whistle-blower. For your organization. He worked in the same section of Frye Chemical as me, and he told me once that you......that FLAG....paid for information about orders of certain chemicals......"

"We like to keep abreast of the market," said Devon mildly. "You want money, is that it?"

Emily Jones looked up, eyes flashing. "No! If you think that's why I'm here....."

"I don't. But...." Devon made his voice gentler......"may I assume that you do know of an order that would interest FLAG?"

She nodded. "Two in the last month alone." She was fiddling with the clasps of her briefcase. "But that's not why I'm here, Mr. Miles. Not really."

Devon let her drag out the pause, regarding her with growing interest. The chemicals that he paid people to keep an eye on were the ones used in the production of Kitt's MBS, which were not exactly the sort of thing one could buy in any old Wall Drug; these were state of the art polymer compounds, molecules tied and twisted and knotted together to form an almost-impenetrable shell. Once, a long time ago, a woman named Adrienne Margaux had stolen the formula for the MBS; they'd changed it, of course, but ever since that experience Devon had had people in all the major chemical companies, watching to see if anyone was buying MBS components in bulk. Two orders of such chemicals in one month was enough to spark Devon's curiosity, but the way Miss Jones was nervously toying with her briefcase made him determined to get to the bottom of this.

At last she looked up. "My friend," she said. "He's disappeared. Three days ago, he just didn't show up for work, and there's no record of him calling in sick; he's not at his apartment, and he hasn't got a girl or any family he could have gone to. I've checked the obits....." She looked away. "I know that's kind of pessimistic, he hasn't been gone long.........but I just have this feeling, Mr. Miles. Something awful happened to him. And I think it's because of those shipments."

"He didn't report them to me," said Devon gently. "Do you even know if he knew about them?"

"He knew about them all right. He was trying to calculate how much the guy who ordered this stuff was paying, and he said it'd have to be the sultan of Brunei or something, or the President, this was one hell of an invoice." Her voice was close to breaking. "Mr. Miles.......I'm scared. I'm really scared. I think someone didn't want anyone to know about these chemicals being bought, and when Kyle found out......"

"Does anyone at Frye know you know about it?"

"I don't think so." She opened the briefcase and pulled out a bunch of Web printouts. "These are off the company server, right before it crashed the other day. No one seems to know why it crashed. Monthly sales, itemized." She floated the papers across the desk. "Two shipments, right there in the middle of the month. And....." she pulled out a small photograph "...this is Kyle."

"You want us to find him," said Devon. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

He reached across the desk and took her hands. "Miss Jones, rest assured we will do our best." He didn't say, Because whoever is buying this stuff almost certainly wants to use it for something we don't want them to use it for, and they also don't want me to know about it. 

_Thank god Garth Knight is dead. And his mother._

"Thank you so much, Mr. Miles," said Emily, squeezing his fingers gratefully. "I...gotta go. I'll be late for work."

"Emily," said Devon. "Be careful. Don't let anyone at Frye know you are aware of any of this."

She nodded once, and left, clutching her now-empty briefcase to her chest. Devon wished he'd told her to stay out of work altogether, to let them protect her, but that was the best way in the world to tell the people behind this that they were being watched.

***

Karr, only half-awake, regarded the dim laboratory and remembered things. It was coming back to him in flashes, rather than the seamless recall he was used to; occasionally a flash would fill up a gap in his memory, and then things would make a little more sense, but it was still fairly confusing. He remembered being activated, remembered the fear and the panic at the test track as he destroyed the mannequins, remembered his own confusion and fright as they shut him down again, remembered the blind-deaf-mute emptiness of deactivation. There had been a man there, off and on, before the first of his deaths; a tall man with thick dark hair and a pointed goatee, a man who was son to Wilton Knight. For some reason Karr found himself thinking of him now, thinking of the hungry way he had looked at Karr, as if memorizing every detail for later. 

It had been Garth Knight who had begun Karr's mental record of dealing with humans. He had consistently referred to Karr as "it," discussing "its" shortfalls while he leaned against the hood, telling "it" to shut up. And because Garth Knight was the boss's son and heir, his behavior was emulated by the rest of the people working on the project. Karr quickly grew to expect it, and retreated into cold and minimalist conversation, speaking only when spoken to, and that only when necessary. His interactions with humans later on were all coloured by this early experience, and over time he grew to believe that they were all the same, all trying to thwart his purpose, all against him.

Judy McBride seemed, logically, not to be human.

Karr sighed to himself. He wondered what was happening to him, why he was here in this strange grey laboratory, where "Omega Technology" was, and what was in store for him. For once, he didn't want to know. He had what could only be described as a bad feeling about it.

tbc


	4. Four

The Prodigal 4

DISCLAIMER: KR is Glen A. Larson's, Corvette and Mako Shark belong to Chevy (and the design forever and always to Bill Mitchell), the quotation at the beginning of this section belongs to whoever owns Dickens's estate.

A/N: I'm having a surprising amount of fun with this new attempt at telling the same damn story again, probably because it feels more like an actual episode of the show than some dreamy fangirl's Romantic Novel. You'll notice I haven't really described Judy yet, not even in terms of how ravishingly beautiful Karr finds her. He doesn't. He thinks she's interesting. 

Anyway, I know the plot is hackneyed, but so was the show: there's always a missing Man (or Woman) Who Knew Too Much, and a grandiose evil scheme involving Big Corporations, and Michael always ended up kissing a different girl at the end. I think I'll spare poor Emily Jones that.

__

You know you are recalled to life?

They tell me so.

You can bear a little more light?

I must bear it if you let it in.

-Dickens

Judy slammed the door of Lab Q behind her and leaned against it, breathing hard. None of the spy thrillers she'd read had quite prepared her for Wilson taking her aside in one of the older elevators, switching on something that looked like a black golf ball ("Microjammer," he'd explained hurriedly, talking out of the side of his mouth in the way she'd always expected spies to) and telling her a story she didn't want to hear.

It wasn't surprising though. Somehow she'd expected this day to come....she was mentally prepared for it, somehow, as if she'd known this would happen from the day she arrived in Wingate as a fresh-faced grad with the world at her feet. She pushed herself upright against the door and made her way to the chair by Karr's workbench. _Gotta look normal. They're watching you. They've been watching you._

"Judy? Is something wrong?"

He sounded.......a little stronger than before. Weary and almost unimaginably sad, but stronger. She sighed, flopping into the chair. 

"I don't know," she lied. "Karr. What do you remember before waking up here?"

He was quiet for a moment. She was almost afraid that awful helpless cascade of numbers would show up on the screen, but there was nothing there besides the blinking cursor. "Very little," he said at last. "At least, clearly. I can remember vague images, but there are a few that have stayed with me."

"Who created you?" God, she wanted a cigarette so bad.

His voice hardened, became almost grating. "My creator was a man called Wilton Knight. He betrayed me and left me to rot....."

She said nothing, having heard a little change in timbre as he trailed off. Reading Karr's voice was a full-time job, since he didn't have any facial features to convey emotion or intent; you had to listen carefully, or you'd miss things. He gave an electronic cough and began again. 

"Wilton Knight was a very.....ambitious man. And a very rich one. He had an idea, and the funds to make it real, but he didn't.....take into account all the ramifications of his design."

Judy leaned forward, wiping away some of the desert-varnish on the light panels, watching as the LEDs lit and died with his voice. "I think I can understand that," she said gently. "No one has ever, to my knowledge, succeeded in creating anything like you before. You have no predecessor; no one would have known all the things to be measured and controlled."

"I know that now," said Karr quietly. "Years in the desert give you a sort of perspective. I don't really remember much beyond Wilton, and his son Garth, sitting around in the lab where I was born and discussing the project. I was installed as the control system for a very advanced vehicle, and I was to be partnered with a human driver. Wilton had a kind of idea that one person could make a difference, or something. I was new. I didn't understand."

Judy said nothing; she found herself stroking the voice panel, but he wasn't asking her to stop, so she didn't.

"My primary programming directive was self-preservation," he said.

"Oh."

"Yes. Quite."

"So.....at all costs?"

"Exactly." He coughed. "I destroyed a few models of human children, and they shut me down. No explanation, no chance. Garth Knight watched as they pulled my plug. I don't remember anything else until the second time I was activated; two humans broke into the lab where I was stored and turned me on by mistake, and used me to get remarkably rich before..." He broke off. Judy's fingers stilled on the panel.

"Before what?"

"There was another one. Another AI. They tried again, and this time they got it right." His voice was bitter as aloes. "He and I fought. He forced me off a cliff."

Judy hissed in breath through her teeth. "Oh, God."

Karr gave his little cough again, the lights flickering. "The next thing I was aware of was being reactivated once more, and put back into a car. That time around I was mostly.....unstable, so furious at everything and everyone that I couldn't think straight. I think I remember hoping it was over, that time, just before we hit."

Judy found tears were prickling behind her eyes. How could he be so _calm_ about it? She took her fingers away from the voice panel, swallowing. "I.....heard something strange today. About you."

"What was it?" he asked, his voice bone-weary, as if he had expected this.

"That....." she began, then stopped, glancing casually at the corners of the room. She turned the brightness of the screen down and began to type; this was a closed system, no one else could access it, and she doubted even the best cameras would be able to get what she was typing, if she did it fast; she sacrificed grammatical accuracy for speed.

erase everything once ive typed it

A pause, then the line vanished. Understood.

okay, this place is apparently a huge front for an operation to get you back from the desert and to refurbish you.

Flick, the letters were gone. 

Why? I have been scattered in pieces for years. 

the man said theyre going to put you in a car hes seen it its armored somehow

Armored?

thicker steel and some sprayon stuff he thinks is a shell

No answer.

karr you there?

Yes. 

who would do this? who knew about you?

They are all dead, he said. 

i bet youd remember if youd seen this man before. hes tall dark has a goatee limps always carries a black cane dresses a bit like john travolta has a horrible scar down the left side of his face

....

karr?

Blue eyes?

yes empty like holes hes terrifying

It must be a coincidence. Hold on.

She watched the blank screen, and heard the clicking and stuttering of a long-term drive being accessed. 

He doesn't look like this, does he?

The screen flicked a picture up, very briefly, just long enough to send a shock of cold fear flooding through Judy like ocean surf. The man leaning happily against a black Trans Am was about ten years younger than Mr. Smith, but the face—minus Mr. Smith's scar and pointed vanity beard—was identical. Long, slim, brown, dark curly hair. She swallowed back a sudden rush of nausea and sat back in the chair, reaching out to type one word.

yes

**

"Where are we going, Michael?"

"Frye Chemical," said Michael, swinging in through the open sunroof without bothering with the door. Kitt sighed.

"You _know_ I don't like it when you do that."

"Sorry, pal," said Michael unrepentantly and slid the Trans Am into reverse, locking the wheel hard right after a few feet and stomping on the pedals, shifting up and squealing away in a cloud of reeking rubber. "Got to hustle."

Kitt said nothing, raising a mental eyebrow. Normally the snap one-eighty turn was restricted to situations where it might impress girls. Michael kept the hammer down all the way out to the interstate, cruising at eighty.

"Michael?"

"Yeah?"

"Are we in a hurry for some particular reason?"

Michael tried to make his face impassive, something he was totally unable to do. Kitt, amused and concerned at once, watched his efforts. "Well.......yes and no."

"That answer is illogical," Kitt pointed out.

"I know, partner, I know. It may be something, it may be nothing."

"Can I at least know why we're going to Frye?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." Michael tapped the wheel with his fingertips, frustrated at the slow speed of freeway traffic. "A girl called Devon because her friend and coworker there has disappeared. No family, no girlfriend, nowhere he's likely to've gone."

"So we're finding him?"

"Yeah," said Michael, relieved. "Yeah, that's just what we're doing, Partner."

There was no way in hell he was telling Kitt that someone was probably making MBS again, which probably meant another Goliath or Karr, until he was sure. No sense worrying Kitt needlessly.

"Michael, was this missing man involved in anything illegal?"

"I don't know yet. He hasn't got a record that the police know of. Kyle Gerson, twenty-seven, last known address 57 A Chaparral Drive."

Kitt's long-term memory flicked a couple of security shots up on the dash screens. "His ID photo from Frye, when he started working there in 1989."

"So the man's been there a while. Good record?"

Kitt flashed through high-class firewalls and coded entry blocks with ease, finding himself in the Frye Chemical secure server within seconds. "No complaints except one write-up to a superior for being in an unauthorized area without clearance. That was.....four years ago now."

Michael struggled to remember what had happened four years ago. "That was when... that guy was trying to build an MBS-protected tank......?"

"Exactly, Michael," said Kitt. "I believe Devon has people at the major chemical manufacturers who let us know when anyone buys a large shipment of any MBS component."

"And Gerson was one of these people?"

"It would seem to be the case," said Kitt. 

"Then we'd better find him fast."

**

"Well?"

"It's coming along on schedule, Mr. Smith," said a white coat."One more week and the shell will be ready for tests."

"And the rest of it?"

"Lasers in place; rear deck cannon in place. We're working on the dual automatic rifles in the front end."

"Very well. And the....other features?"

Another white coat, this one with a clipboard, stepped forward. "With the adaptable snorkel, the vehicle is capable of submersed locomotion in up to seven feet of water; hovercraft skirts allow it to travel on the surface for a range of three hundred miles on one fuel tank."

"What about the jump?"

"Vertical clearance of thirty feet with takeoff velocity of ninety miles an hour," said the white coat. 

"Excellent." Garth Knight leaned on his cane and regarded the low black form of his revenge. It wasn't exactly black; the bonded shell undercoats had given the steel a very dark thundercloud-grey shine. He thought it would look like polished titanium in daylight, and found the image pleasing.

They had taken the design specs for the 1966 Corvette Mako Shark II, what Knight had always considered the ultimate sports car, and modified them slightly to include the great turbine engine, the myriad defense features, the ability to jump over reasonably short buildings in a single bound. Garth Knight had directed the design of the turbine himself, running on what he remembered from his time with his father and the research he'd done on jet propulsion. The hood of the Shark was open, and he could see the empty space lined with antistatic cushioning, about the size of a modern VCR, sitting snug against the firewall.

"Nothing will go wrong this time," said Garth Knight, confidently. "It's my time now. Finally, it's my time."

The white coats shared a quick glance, returned to their positions. "Sir, how is the CPU coming along?"

"Well, I'm as curious as you," said Knight silkily. "I'm going to go and find out."

Another exchanged glance, and the white coats sighed for whoever was in charge of the CPU. They'd all seen Mr. Smith in this bright empty mood before, and it boded ill for someone. Hopefully, not them.

The boss turned and limped out, his bodyguards flanking him and one step behind; they knew better than to offer an arm for support. When he was gone, the first white coat put down his clipboard and leaned heavily on the sleek Shark. "This better be it," he said wearily. "This better be the end of it."

"Yeah," said another one, more fatalistically, "and how long do you think we'd last after the project is over? We know too much."

The first white coat sighed. "Did he ever say what he was going to do with this thing?"

"Well, I think he's going to use it to end world hunger," said his colleague, witheringly. "And maybe find a cure for AIDS."

"No need to be nasty."

"There's nothing left to be."

tbc


	5. Five

Disclaimer: Knight Rider and all its characters and related indicia belong to Glen A. Larson; Corvette, Mako Shark and related indicia belong to Chevrolet. No copyright infringement intended. Good Lord, I'm getting sick of typing that, I'm going to make it into a macro.

A/N: I'm rather surprised and pleased that people have been reading this at all. Especially you, Knightshade; I've read your stuff, and I'm entranced. So thanks. And I'm afraid this isn't going to be pleasant, but it will end roughly the way the show always ended; with someone behind bars and someone else driving off into the desert amid a shower of bad one-liners. So stay with me, people?

The Prodigal, chapter 5

**Frye Chemical, Las Vegas, Nevada**

Michael slid Kitt neatly into a slant parking space in front of the Frye Chemical building. It featured the sort of architecture he always thought of as Mid-Seventies Ugly, and the big sans-serif letters spelling out the company name were set into the yellow brick in brushed steel. Not a very inviting sight.

He got out, closed Kitt's door. "Surveillance mode, pal. I'm going to see if I can find some answers."

Kitt didn't answer, but the LEDs on the surveillance-mode switch lit and glowed. Michael straightened up, wrinkling his nose at the faint sweet scent of benzene in the air, and walked into the building. 

The reception area was also Mid-Seventies Ugly, and the carpet was worn and stained, but the receptionist behind the avocado-colored metal desk looked more like Late Nineties Expensive. Her hair looked as if the streaks in it might've come from a bottle, but if so, it had been one with Paul Mitchell on the side; her face was carefully made-up in a way that made Michael think of daytime TV stars, smooth and shaded and utterly unremarkable. He put on his famous grin and went over to the desk.

"Hi," he said, grinning. "I'm Michael Knight, I was wondering if I could get some information about a friend of mine who works here?"

The receptionist looked up, gave him a measuring glance. "I'm sorry, Mr. Knight, but we don't give out personal information about our employees."

"Oh, no," he said. "No, that's cool. I was just kinda worried, I hadn't heard from him in a while, and I was wondering if he was still working here."

She sighed. "What name?"

"Gerson. Kyle Gerson."

He was watching her face closely, and he saw the flicker of alarm under the careful paint. She recovered quickly, and typed something into her keyboard. Damn flat-panel monitors, he thought. Can't see what she's doing.

"Mr. Gerson is no longer employed with Frye Chemical," she said pleasantly. "I'm sorry to've wasted your time, Mr. Knight."

He stuck the grin back on. "Not at all. Thanks for your help. Oh….did it say when he quit?"

She typed again. "He gave in his notice two weeks and three days ago, and his last day of work was Monday of this week. Now if you don't mind, I have some work to do…"

"Of course," said Michael. "Thanks a lot. You've been very helpful." He turned and walked out of the reception area, thinking, the grin still stuck on his face, and slid behind Kitt's wheel.

"Well?"

"She's lying about one thing," said Michael. "If Devon's contact was right, Gerson didn't give in his notice. He just disappeared. Three days ago."

"You might be interested to know that a call's going out from the reception desk," said Kitt, his voice tight. Michael wondered at it, but didn't say anything except "Can you patch us in?"

The voice of the blonde receptionist suddenly filled the cabin, as Kitt reversed out of the parking slot and pulled back on the road. She didn't sound pleasant anymore.

"….just left. He was asking about Gerson."

"What did he look like?" asked a man's voice, harsh and oddly familiar.

"Tall, dark hair, leather jacket. Look, someone's clearly leaked something. I don't like this."

"He might come back. Put extra security on the compound. I don't want anyone snooping around."

"What if he does come back?"

"Take care of him." There could be no question about the meaning of the man's statement; his voice was like a knell. The connection was cut, and Kitt turned off the videophone with a click that sounded very loud in the sudden silence.

"Michael," he said, quietly. "I don't like this."

Michael was reflecting how odd it was having someone discuss your own death; it felt as if a cold steel rod had been inserted down the back of his shirt and was being pressed against his spine. "Neither do I, pal," he said, after a minute, suddenly wanting a cigarette for the first time in years. "Neither do I."

Kitt was quiet for the rest of the ride back to FLAG. He didn't want to tell Michael what he'd realized, what his voice-analysis had come up with. The man's voice had been more than familiar. It was the voice of a dead man.

**

**Omega Technology, Wingate, Utah**

Judy was sitting back in her chair, still staring at the blank screen, when the door behind her first clicked and then slid open as somebody's keycard registered. She got up in a hurry, wanting to say something to Karr, wanting to warn him to keep quiet, but she had a feeling it would be unnecessary. That strange silence, and then the picture he had shown her, made her believe he was perhaps better-informed than she about Mr. Smith.

Who now walked into the lab, his black collar spread wide over the lapels of his white John-Travolta suit, his cane glittering gently in his hand. She noticed vaguely that he was wearing what looked like an ivory necklace. _Wouldn't surprise me. Probably narwhal ivory, or maybe woolly mammoth. Something disgustingly expensive._

He strolled over to the console, and she was very glad her screen was blank as she put on a smile and tilted her head at him. The two grey-suited goons who followed him like a bad smell took up their positions behind and two steps to the left and right of him. 

"I've come to check on your progress," he said. "How is the system recovery going?"

Judy took a deep, steadying breath, and found that she was resting her hand possessively on the casing. She took it away, made her hands lie calmly by her sides. "Very well, sir. I believe total system recovery is possible. I have replaced the worst of the damaged circuitry, and the rest of it is just a matter of rewriting lost code."

Smith nodded. She didn't like the look in those empty eyes. They really were like blue holes, she reflected; holes, or blank screens. _The blue screen of death_, she thought suddenly, and fought an awful urge to giggle. _The one that comes up when your system is comprehensively fucked, and you have to shut down entirely._ "Good," he said. "Are the voice circuits functional?"

Judy swallowed, and heard the heatsink fan in the casing spin up. He was listening to this. Would he understand if she lied?

She couldn't chance it. "Mostly, sir. Voice modulation appears to have a few glitches, but voice recognition and transit from text to speech are clear." _Not that you told me about that when you assigned me to the project._

Smith grinned. His teeth looked like tombstones, big and white and square. "Excellent." He turned a little to face the casing on the bench. "Karr, can you hear me?"

There was a pause, while Judy's heart fluttered sickly in her chest for no reason she could name; she thought Smith could probably hear it. Then Karr spoke, and his voice was so different she almost didn't recognize it: cold, emotionless, empty. The voice of a machine. 

"Affirmative," he said. Smith's grin widened.

"Do you recognize me?"

"Affirmative," said Karr, again. "What is my mission?"

"Nothing you need to worry about right now," said Smith. "What do you remember?"

Karr gave his little electronic cough. Judy saw Smith's blank blue eyes flicker a little at the sound. "The inferior production line model and I collided. There is a gap in my memory banks, ending with my reactivation in this facility."

"What do you remember about the inferior production line model?" inquired Smith.

"It is partnered with a human," said Karr, still in that metallic monotone. It made Judy feel cold and a little sick to hear him sounding like that, so different from the way he had spoken before. She wondered if this was the real Karr, and the thing she had met, had conversed with, had been a figment of her imagination. "They usurped my rightful place."

"Yes," said Smith, almost gently. "They did. Would you like to get revenge on them, Karr? Both of them, and the foundation they represent?"

_Why am I here? Why is he letting me know all this?_

The answer came to her with a trickle of fear. _So that I know too much. So that he has a good reason to get rid of me, at the end of this. So that I am more good to him dead than alive._

Karr did not speak for a moment, and when he did, Judy felt tears prickling behind her eyes. "Yes," he said simply. "I want to destroy them all."

"Good!" said Smith happily, a teacher with an apt pupil. "Very good. You shall have your wish, Karr, and so shall I. Together we'll get them back. For everything. You want the other AI, and I want Michael Knight. And together we shall have them."

"Excellent," said Karr coldly.

"Miss McBride," said Smith. "Continue with your work. I want the system ready for integration into its matrix by next week."

"Yes, sir," she said, totally lost as to what connections would need to be made, what other alterations she would need to do in order for this to happen, but not wanting to keep him here in the lab a moment longer than she had to. "Of course."

"Carry on," he said, unhooking his cane and smiling that tombstone smile at her. "Oh, and Miss McBride?"

"Yes, sir?"

"I'm sure I don't have to tell you that this project is top secret. Nothing goes beyond the walls of this lab. Are we clear on this?"

Judy nodded fervently. "Yes, sir. Crystal clear."

"Good." Smith turned to go, limping, and his goons fell in behind him. Judy stayed where she was, at attention, until the lab door had closed behind them and the lock slid home. Then she let out a long sour breath and half-fell into the chair.

Silence, only the sounds of the heatsink fan spinning. She wondered what on earth she was going to do, wondered what Karr really was, what he was going to be used for. She had heard death in Smith's voice as clearly as she had heard the metallic resonance of a cheap voice modulator in Karr's. She stared at the closed door, dazed, for a long time. 

The soft sound of a cough startled her out of it. She turned, found the screen was no longer blank. 

Judy?

Judy, please talk to me?

Again, she felt that odd sensation of fluttering in her chest. Her fingers stumbled on the keys. Karr, what the hell was that all about?

The letters vanished as soon as she typed them, she was pleased to see. There was a brief pause, and then: That was Garth Knight.

who?

Garth Knight. It's a long story.

do you mind telling it? I think I need to know

I was created by a man named Wilton Knight. I told you about his idealistic image of catching criminals above and beyond the reach of the law. And I was his first failed attempt, as I also told you.

yes

Wilton died before he could see his dream become a reality. He had a son, though. One son, and one daughter. Both of them were estranged, and Garth was already a career criminal by the time the project that created me was begun. When the second AI was made, it was partnered with a human. He was the man in the picture I showed you.

but he looked just like smith. I mean Knight.

Yes. I don't know why, but he must have had plastic surgery to make his resemblance to Wilton's son so distinct. It matches on every point of physical comparison. To all extents and purposes, it is the same face. 

Karr paused. Judy felt her fingers twitching on the keyboard, wanting to type, wanting to talk to him, to hear his voice again, rather than that dead blank voice he had just used. 

Garth hated this man, who took the name Michael Knight. I didn't understand back then, but I believe he felt Michael Knight had taken his rightful place as Wilton's son. He may even be the legal heir to Knight's money, I don't know. But Garth hates him. I don't exactly know what he has done, but I have a feeling he has attacked Michael Knight and the other AI, perhaps more than once. He means to kill them. Apparently he means to use me to do so. 

god

The other thing you need to know is that he is officially dead.

Judy stared. what?

I've connected to the net; there's a wireless link, don't tell anyone. Garth Knight is reported officially deceased. In an automobile accident, in the early eighties.

karr what are we going to do? what is he planning to use you for? I was so frightened when you were talking to him

If he believes I am what he used to know me as, there is a chance of getting out of this.

not for me he's going to have me killed

Karr didn't say anything. Judy bit her lip. I know he is, he wants no witnesses to whatever he's going to do to this michael guy, he wants everything here totally sealed off

Judy?

yeah

Do you trust me?

She stared at the screen, which flicked itself blank again. 

yes, she typed, and meant it. She was almost surprised at how much she meant it. 

I need you to help me, he said. I need you to keep him happy until after they have put me in the car and connected it up. Specifically, I need you to convince him that I am what he thinks I am, and that I want Knight and his AI dead as much as he does.

do you?

A pause. Not really. Not anymore.

they took your place. they stole it from you.

It was a long time ago, he said. It wasn't my fault that they didn't program me right, and it wasn't really their fault that they panicked and started over. Like you said, they had no idea what they were getting into.

She felt the weariness in his words, even without hearing it. what made you change your mind?

I had nothing to do but think, all those years I was barely alive. Years in the desert give you a sort of perspective, like I said. And life is……precious. I don't want to waste whatever life I have in hating other people.

She felt like crying. what about the other ai? the inferior production line model?

I don't suppose I'll ever stop resenting him. His name is Kitt. You'd like him, I think. Everyone else does.

kitt?

Knight Industries Two Thousand. 

and he's different?

His central core directive is to protect Michael Knight, rather than himself. That gives you an idea.

I see. 

Judy, could you look at my voice modulator circuits? Something hurts.

of course. is it that cough?

A pause, perhaps he was wondering what she was talking about. yes, he said, and she had the odd feeling that he was embarrassed. 

She smiled a little. I was noticing. 

She turned away from the keyboard and unscrewed the top of the casing, revealing the circuitry—odd to see those brand-new chips in the desert-worn casing—and sighed. "Is it a short somewhere?

"I don't know," he said, and she couldn't help the wave of relief that rolled over her at the sound of his voice; it was him again, not that dead machine-voice he had used with Smith….Knight, she reminded herself. Garth Knight. "It comes and goes. I think maybe one of the wires is fraying." 

Judy nodded and took the cover off the modulator. She hadn't touched it so far, and she wasn't entirely surprised to find that alkaline dust puffed out when she opened it up. "Damn," she said. "No wonder you're coughing."

He said nothing. "I'm going to disconnect it for a minute. Hold on."

"Right," he said. She broke the connections and lifted the modulator out of the casing, laying it on the bench. Once the desert-dust was gone, she could see what he had been talking about: several of the hard-soldered connections were bent, almost broken, and one of them had a little aureole of carbon around it where a spark had jumped. She fired up the soldering iron, smiling as the familiar smell of hot metal rose, and began to repair it.

The screen blinked. Thank you.

"No thanks needed," she told him, squinting at the circuitry. "It's what I do."

No; thank you for listening. I think I needed to tell someone all that a while ago. Nobody was going to listen.

"Karr," she said, setting down the soldering iron, "I think I said this before, but you have been associating with entirely the wrong sort of people all your life. I…" She paused, sighed. "I like you. I honestly like you, and not just because you're fantastic and strange and new."

A long pause. No one has ever said that to me before. 

Judy smiled, and went on with her work.

**

**Frye Chemical, Las Vegas, Nevada**

Emily Jones sighed. It had been a long day; she'd spent her lunch hour meeting with Devon Miles, and she was absolutely starving, but she couldn't take any more time off; people would notice. The fear that had gripped her ever since Kyle had disappeared was getting stronger, and she wondered if she had done right, going to the Foundation, or whether she was just getting herself in worse trouble than she was in already. 

She set aside the pile of reallocation forms she was working on and opened her email. Three messages from the accounting associates in Payable, one from a friend asking her if she was free on Saturday night to have dinner with him. Nothing special. She clicked on "Get Messages," and another one popped up, and she felt cold dripping down all her bones. _Official Summons for Emily A. Jones_, said the subject line.

She opened it; what else, she thought, could she do? 

_This is an official summons for the employee mentioned below. Emily A. Jones, accounting associate grade C, is hereby summoned to appear at a board review meeting to take place on the afternoon of November 9, 1998, at 3:45 PM._

Emily read the brief message again. No signature. It was sent from the central admin office of Frye, and the meeting was for that day.

She had the unpleasant feeling that she might not be showing up for work again. Ever. Nevertheless, she cleared off her desk, organizing the folders and files, and checked her watch. Three-thirty.

On a sudden and very strong hunch, she fished her cell phone out of the pocket of her coat and dialled the Foundation. Three rings. Four. Five. Finally there was a click. 

"Foundation for Law and Government, Devon Miles speaking. How may I help you?"

"Mr. Miles," Emily said, trying to keep her voice low. Who knew what sort of bugs this place had in it now? "It's Emily Jones, I met with you today. Something's happened."

Devon's voice was alert, concerned. "What sort of something? Are you all right?"

"Yes, but I have to go to a board meeting. I don't know why. I think someone might've figured out where I went."

"Miss Jones, can you be more specific?"

"I don't think I have time. I just…"

The phone was dead in her hand. She stared at the little screen, which had gone totally blank, and tried pushing the buttons; no keypad tone, no light. No response.

A hand fell on her shoulder. "Miss Jones?"

She turned, eyes wide and frightened, and saw two men in dark suits standing behind her. "Miss Jones, it's time for you to come with us."

tbc


	6. Six my, aren't I creative?

Disclaimer: KR belongs to Glen A. Larson; Corvette and Mako Shark belong to Chevrolet, no copyright infringement intended.

The Prodigal, chapter 6

**Foundation for Law and Government, ****Las Vegas****, ****Nevada**

            Kitt pulled up to the mansion, slowly, with more care than usual. He had been wondering, all through the drive back from Frye, how on earth a dead man could have made a phone call. There was a faint possibility that the voice had been a synthesized reproduction of Garth Knight's, but the probability density function Kitt calculated for that wasn't anywhere near convincing.

            Two things, then. Someone was making MBS and didn't want FLAG to know; and Garth Knight _still_ wasn't dead.

            Kitt sighed. "Michael?"

            "Yeah, pal? You've been awfully quiet."

            "Michael, something's not right. I…" 

            The videophone cut him off. Devon's face was tight and drawn, even on the little dashboard screen. "Michael, thank goodness you're back," he said over the line. "Come in. We have a problem."

            "What kind of problem?" Michael asked, looking in concern at his boss.

            "I think Emily Jones needs your help."

            Michael thumped the steering wheel. "They must've fingered her as another informant. Dammit!"

            "Michael," said Kitt again, quietly. "The call. The man's voice, remember…?"

            "How could I forget? He was talking about them killing me."

            "I know," said Kitt, aware that Devon was hearing this too. "I know who was calling. It was Garth Knight."

            Silence for a minute, then Devon frowned. "Kitt, are you absolutely sure?"

            "Pal, that's impossible. Garth's been dead for years." Michael was looking at the dash in concern. Kitt sighed.

            "I know that. But the voice is Garth's. I don't know how to explain it." Kitt lit up another monitor with a jagged line dancing on it; Michael recognized it as the waveform of a voice, even before the sound came through the speakers.

            "This is a recording of the phone call we intercepted today," said Kitt. Another line lit up under the first one, dancing in exact mimicry. "And this is an old recording of Garth. Watch." The lines converged, forming a single waveform. "It's an exact match."

            Michael let out a low whistle. "I don't believe it."

            "I don't think you have a choice, Michael," said Devon. "This is more serious than we thought. The girl who reported Kyle Gerson missing called me just a few moments ago. She got cut off, but before she did, she told me that she had been summoned to some meeting or other, and she sounded frankly terrified."

            "You think she's in danger?" said Michael.

            "Judging by the call you intercepted," said Devon, "I think we all are. Kitt, how fast can you get back to Frye?"

            "Illegally, in about twenty minutes," said Kitt. The sun was going down; they'd hit traffic, but they knew ways around that. 

            "Go," said Devon, and cut the connection. Kitt lit his engine again, and Michael pulled them away from the front of the house with a scream of angry rubber.

            It was an unpleasant ride. Even with Kitt's advanced technology and knowledge of shortcuts, it was still closer to three quarters of an hour before they arrived back at Frye Chemical. The stink of inorganic solvents in the air was thicker now, heavier, and dusk was turning into darkness. Kitt switched off his great headlamps, rolling into the parking lot in silent mode, almost totally invisible except for the dim red glow of his scanner track.

            "Kitt, can you locate Emily?"

            There was a moment of silence, and then: "I believe so. Most people have left the buildings, but I am reading several humans in a room in the basement. One of them matches Emily's description."

            "Is she okay?"

            "Her vital signs are not wonderful, but I am not reading any major injuries." Kitt's voice was subdued; Michael heard controlled fright in his tones. "Michael, be careful. These people mean to kill you."

            "Well," said Michael, "let's make it difficult for them, shall we?"

            Kitt sighed. "Please. Be careful."

            "I will." Michael reached out and stroked the wheel gently. "Can you disarm the security system?"

            "Certainly. But you'll have to deal with two armed guards on the inside."

            "What about a diversion?"

            Kitt sighed again. "Just say the word."    

            Michael grinned. "Grease is the word, pal, you know that." He patted Kitt's wheel and hurried up to the side door of Frye's main admin building, listening for the dull click of the lock being disarmed.

**Frye Chemical, ****Las Vegas****, ****Nevada******

            In the basement, in a room redolent of multisyllabic liquids and poisonous steam, Emily Jones huddled on a metal folding chair and watched the blonde receptionist and a man in a dark and unremarkable suit discuss her. 

            She had gone beyond fear to a kind of dull apathy, aware of the pain in her wrists and ankles where they had been bound together with plastic cable-ties only as a distant discomfort. Likewise, the voices of the two people talking about her seemed to come from very far away, as if she was hearing them inside a conch shell instead of the ocean.

            "….the boss said to take care of him if he came back."

            "Well, I don't think that'll be a problem, I mean the security's on double shifts. Besides, he'll lose interest once our little friend here calls them back and tells them it's all a mistake."

            "I don't think they're giving up that easy," said the receptionist, who had pulled back her hair into a no-nonsense bun and changed her slick Cassini suit for a dark coverall. "This guy looked like he was a professional."

            "Well, if he does come back, his ass is ours. Now." He turned back to Emily. "What do you suppose we should do with her once she's done her job?"

            The blonde shrugged. "I don't care. Just make it quick."

            "You're no fun, Madison. No fun at all."

            The blonde—Madison—gave him an unpleasant smile. Emily thought dully that she looked as if someone had tightened  her face all over with surgical staples; her lips drew back from perfect teeth in a grin that was more of a snarl. "I'm plenty fun, Davis. But this is work, not pleasure."

            Emily wondered vaguely why she seemed to have fallen into the middle of a bad thriller novel; any moment now the man would twirl his mustache and tie her to the train tracks. She slumped a little further in the chair, thinking how simple it had all been, how easy for them to find and follow her, and wondering how long they had been watching and waiting for her to make her mistake. 

            Madison was pacing. "When are you going to make the call?"

            "Soon. I want to make sure the building is clear."

            "Come on, Davis. I want to get out of here."

            "All right, all right. Gosh, you're needy, aren't you?" He grinned and pulled a cell phone from his pocket,  bounced it on his palm. "Miss Jones."

            Emily looked up; it felt as if all the tendons in her neck had been replaced with overcooked spaghetti, and it took all her strength to raise her head.

            "Miss Jones, I want you to listen to me very carefully. You are going to speak to the interfering Mr. Miles and you are going to tell him calmly and firmly that all of this was a mistake, and that your suspicions are unconfirmed, and not to worry, that you are retracting your statements. If you don't, I will kill you."

            The way he said it, as if he was explaining something very simple to a dull child, made her shiver. "Why should I do what you say? You're going to kill me anyway."

            "Mmm," he agreed, "but your cooperation makes the difference between a nice quick bullet through the head and a slow dissolution by any one of these lovely chemicals in these tanks behind us. Or maybe I'll put you in the sublimation chamber and replace the air with sulfuric acid. Or I could dip parts of you in sodium hydroxide, what do you think? How about a nice benzene and chloric acid cocktail?" He was very close to her now, and she noticed a faint smell of Old Spice rising from him; it was the scent she associated with her father, and it made her want to scream. 

            "Okay," she said in a high, strengthless voice. "Okay, I'll do whatever you want only don't hurt me, please don't do those things to me…"

            "There's a good girl," said the man Davis, straightening up. He dialed the Foundation, and bent over to hold the phone to her ear, very close, the smell of sweat and Old Spice filling her nostrils. It was ringing.

            "Foundation for Law and Government, Devon Miles speaking," said a faraway, tinny voice.

            "Mr. Miles? It's Emily Jones." She closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to see Davis's grin and the steel tanks behind him. "I wanted to let you know that everything's all right. I was mistaken when I called earlier, and there's nothing weird going on here."

            Davis inched closer. 

            "…nothing at all." She made her voice sound as strong and convinced as she could.

            "Miss Jones, are you all right?"

            "Oh, yes," said Emily. She was amazed how convincing it sounded. "I'm fine. I'm sorry to've wasted your time, Mr. Miles." 

            She had a feeling Devon was about to say something else, but Davis took his phone back and snapped it shut. "Not bad," he said. "Now, it's time to move on to the next round. Madison, what do you think?"

            "I think you should stop fucking around and let's get out of here," said the woman in the coverall, tossing a gun in her hand. Emily wondered where she'd got it, since she hadn't been carrying it a moment before. It was a nasty gun. A Desert Eagle .50. She looked as if she would have no problem using it.

            "Patience, patience," said Davis. He slipped the phone back into his pocket and straightened up. "You have no creativity, Madison, that's your problem. Come with me, Miss Jones."

            Emily got up, feeling sicker than ever. "What are you going to do to me?"

            "I haven't decided yet," said Davis, with a smile. "I'm sure I'll think of something."

            Just then the radio crackled and spat static at them. Emily jumped, and was dimly pleased to see the other woman doing the same thing. Davis sighed in annoyance and pressed a button. "Yeah?"

            "There's a disturbance on the north side of the building, sir," came the voice of a security guard. "Someone's tried to get in."

            "Shit," said Madison, racking the Desert Eagle. "Davis, we gotta go."

            "Relax, honey. If it's that Knight guy, we'll take care of him too." He grinned and took Emily's arm, propelling her firmly back past row after row of stainless-steel tanks, and stopped at the back wall of the room. The last tank on the left had its five-inch-thick hatch wide open, revealing total darkness.

            "In you get, sweetness," said Davis, and gave her a shove. Emily stared at him in horror, back at the chemical stickers on the tank's shiny side. Davis's grin widened, and he pushed her again, hard enough to make her lose her balance and stumble against the side of the tank, and then she was inside, in the acrid-smelling darkness, and the door clanged shut behind her.

            She could hear the locks slamming shut all around the hatch—_like a pressure cooker, she thought helplessly—and beat her fists against the steel. "Please!" she screamed. "Please don't do this!"_

            Her shoes slid on the smooth steel surface of the tank, and for the first time she was aware of a dripping noise in the dark. The nose-tingling smell of chemicals grew stronger.

            Emily slumped to her knees, crying, leaning against the steel wall, and knew there was not the slightest chance of anyone hearing her, or—if they did—coming to let her out. She felt a kind of dull fury at the indignity of this death, this dying like a rat in a trap, but most of her mind had shut down at the sheer horror of her situation, and she was mostly hanging in the blackness, unaware. She didn't raise her head when the dripping quickened into a steady stream, and she was unconscious by the time the rising fluid began to lap at her knees.

            "Michael!" The comlink's hiss was very loud in the darkened corridor; Michael ducked into an empty lab before answering.

            "Yeah, Kitt, what is it?"

            "Two people are leaving the room in the basement. I distracted the other security guards, you're clear, but one of the chemical tanks is filling up rapidly, and I've detected a human inside it."

            "Emily?" He was cold all over. "How long do I have?"

            "At the current rate of flow, about two minutes," said Kitt tightly. "Hurry."

            Michael hurried. He ran down the fire stairs, ducked into a closet as footsteps approached, cursing silently at the delay, and continued down the corridor as soon as it was clear. The door to the basement lab was locked. "Kitt! Can you open this?"

            "I'm trying," said his partner, but it felt like an age before the red light on the card-scan clicked red and the door released. Michael sprinted down the row of tanks, bringing his watch up to his mouth. 

            "What's in the tank?"

            "It seems to be relatively harmless," Kitt shot back. "Pure ethanol."

            Michael skidded to a halt at the end of the row,  tugged at the locks on the inspection hatch, throwing his weight against them,  and managed to get the door open.  The sharp scent of rubbing alcohol filled his nostrils as Emily slumped forward against him, her limp weight sending him staggering back a step or two. 

            He pulled her free of the tank, swung the door shut behind her to stem the tide of ethanol onto the floor of the lab, and laid her out.  She was perhaps mid-twenties, her dark hair pulled back into a barrette and cascading over her shoulders, her face unremarkably pretty. Her glasses had slipped off in the fall and lay on the floor in a puddle of alcohol. Michael bent over her, and was relieved to see she was breathing.

            "Kitt, can you scan her?"

            "She's in mild shock," said the comlink. "Michael, you have to get out of there. Now."

            "I'm on my way, pal," said Michael, gathering Emily's limp form into his arms and trotting back towards the door. "Meet me outside the side entrance."

**Omega Technology, ****Wingate****, ****Utah******

Judy sat at her little Formica table and stared out the window into the blowing darkness. They worked forty hours a week. No overtime. If she had stayed later than five PM in the lab, someone would have come to remove her, and ask some pointed questions as to what she was doing in there after hours.

            Still she couldn't help thinking of him alone there in the lab, alone and possibly in pain—her work on the voice modulator hadn't been wonderful, what he really needed was a brand-new one—waiting for them to come and install him in the car. Whatever it was. She wondered if he was as frightened as she was. If he knew more than he had been telling her.

            The commissary had yielded a six-pack of beer and a couple of frozen dinners,  and she ate sitting by the window and listening to the ceaseless spick-spack of alkali hitting the side of the building. It was a lonely sound. Judy couldn't remember having felt like this before, not even when her father had been in the hospital with a heart attack her senior year of college; it was sort of similar, this feeling that the world was sliding faster and faster out of her control, and all she could do was stand and watch—but now the fear was for herself, as well as for Karr. Despite her assurance to Smith….to _Knight_…….that she would keep what she had heard firmly to herself, she didn't really have much confidence that she would survive the next few days. And what, after all, could she do about it? If Wilson was right—and she had no reason at all to think he wasn't—then they were watching her all the time now, and any call she made out of the Wingate compound would be monitored and recorded. Call for help, and there would come a knocking at the door. Images of Stalinist Russia flickered through her head, and she laughed a laugh that didn't sound convincing even to her.

            _Oh God, why did I ever sign on to this fucking company? she thought, almost desperately. __Why did I come out here into the middle of the desert, alone, and get myself into this in the first place?_

_            Maybe you were meant to be here,_ said the calmer part of her. _Maybe this isn't as bad as it seems. Remember Karr saying that there was a chance? Remember him asking you to trust him?_

She did; and, strangely, thinking about that made her relax a little. The key was not to step back and take a good look at her situation, she realized. Because her situation was pretty damn ludicrous. 

            Judy opened another beer and sat back in the chair. Tomorrow they'd probably put Karr into his shell, whatever it might be. Wilson had said something about a sports car, but she didn't know any specifics. And she doubted she'd be able to see him again, once he was in the car. The project she had been working on would have finished, and so would she.

            She raised the beer can to the unformed darkness outside her window. "Cheers," she said. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we disappear."

            Judy dreamed of running down dark corridors with a light behind her, an oncoming light, and footsteps gaining behind; somewhere someone was crying, on and on, an irritating sound like a waterfall. The wind spattering sand against the building was louder, and for some reason it seemed to be coming in a rhythm, like someone knocking on a door...

            She blinked, awake suddenly in the darkness, listening to the knocking. The clock-radio told her it was three in the morning. By its red light the room looked like part of her dream, but the continued banging on the door put paid to that line of reasoning. She got up, shivering fiercely in the predawn chill, and opened the door. 

            Two security guards in Omega Tech grey stood there, fists raised in mid-knock. For a moment cold washed through her, her heart jittering crazily in her chest, and then she registered the worried look on their faces. "Yeah?" she demanded, her voice unsteady.

            "Judith McBride?"

            "That's me."

            "Sorry to wake you up," said one of the guards. "Um...you're working on a project in Lab Q, right?"

            "Yeah."

            "The boss wants all employees on that project in the lab. Right now."

            Judy frowned. "At this hour of the morning? Is something wrong?" _Is Karr okay?_

            "I don't know, miss," said the guard. "Please. Come with us."

            "Can I get dressed?" she asked, a bit snappishly, and he went pink and nodded. She closed the door again and hurried into her coverall and boots, fingers trembling so hard it was difficult to do up the zipper. _God, what's going on, what's wrong? Has Knight done something to him?_

            The guards hustled her down to a golf-cart waiting outside the apartment block, and they made the drive to Lab Q in silence. 

            Inside, the building seemed more impersonal than ever with the steel corridors deserted, the red lights of the security locks and the dim emergency lights providing the only illumination in a dark labyrinthine world. The guards marched her down to Lab Q and keyed open the door on a remarkable scene. 

            A low, sleek, curvy black car sat in the middle of the vast concrete floor, its hood up, white-coated technicians huddled around it like doctors over a flatlining patient. Thick cables led out of the engine compartment, making Judy think of the blacksnakes she'd sometimes see in the summer back home, slithering across the roads in the humid green afternoons. All the screens were lit up, not only the laptop but also the flat-panel monitor sitting next to the CPU on the bench, or where the CPU had been….

            Judy went cold all over. What had they done with him? The battered black casing wasn't where it should have been, sitting on its antistatic pad next to her computers. She hurried forward, and before Garth Knight could detach himself from the wall he had been indolently leaning against, she caught a glimpse of that familiar casing sitting inside the gleaming engine compartment, snug against the firewall, in a little nest of antistatic insulation. Then Knight was upon her, that cane glittering in his hand, empty blue eyes smiling. "Ah, good evening, Miss McBride."

            She nodded. "Good evening, sir. May I ask what's going on?"

            "You may," said Knight, and laughed at his own wit. He turned away from her and called for one of the technicians to join them. "Ah, Mr. Branson. Take Miss McBride and tell her what is required." He lit a cigar, folding his arms, the cane hooked over one wrist. Branson nodded to her to follow him, and she did, leaning against the polished side of the engine compartment and staring down into the polished labyrinth of metal within. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Knight watching them, a little half-smile on his lips, and hurriedly turned back. Branson sighed.

            "Try and concentrate on this," he said wearily. "He'll get bored and go away, he always does."

            She nodded. "What's going on?"

            "Well, as you can see, the CPU has been installed, but we're gonna need your help to make some of the connections. The idea is that the computer runs the car, all the systems—fuel injection, ignition, timing, electronics, steering, everything, is being controlled via this box. It interfaces with the driver through a voice panel in the cockpit. That's what we need your help for."

            "What's wrong with it?"

            "Nothing's wrong," said Branson with false cheer. "It just….er….needs a bit of reassuring."

            Judy cursed and slipped around to the open driver's side door. A three-column LED voice panel had been set into the console just over where the radio would be in a real car, looking not at all odd among the hundreds of other instruments and gages and readouts and telltales that studded the cockpit; the whole thing made her think of fighter jets. She slid inside, perching on the edge of the seat, which was still covered in plastic from the factory that had made it. All the other techs were ignoring her, intent on making their connections inside the engine compartment. She reached out and ran her fingertips over the panel. "Karr?"

            There was a soft crackle, and one or two of the LEDs lit, but nothing more. She could imagine what it had been like for him; suddenly the dark quiet lab had been full of people, people roughly undoing connections and moving him, shoving him into an unfamiliar surrounding and poking wires into the sides of his CPU….people who weren't talking to him, weren't telling him anything about what would happen….

            "Karr, it's me, it's Judy," she said quietly, absently stroking the wheel. "Everything's all right….they're finishing putting you in the car…."

            He gave his little cough, and she sighed; the modulator still wasn't working right. "…..Judy?" He sounded quiet and frightened and weary, but glad to see her.

            She smiled a little. "Yeah," she said. "How're you feeling?"

            "Odd," he said. His voice had a deeper, richer timbre through the car speakers. She liked it. "I can feel things….the engine block….the fuel system…"

            "You were in a car before, though," said Judy, "right? I mean….it's not entirely unfamiliar?"

            "No, and that's part of what feels so strange; it's as if part of the past has come back whole, while I've changed." He sighed. "Judy, things are moving fast."

            She swallowed. "Why're they doing this in the middle of the night?"

            "I don't know. Shh, here he comes."

            Garth Knight leaned against the low roof of the car, grinning his empty grin. "Well, Miss McBride, what do you think?"

            "It's adjusting nicely," she said, doing her best impression of a clueless girl. 

            "The perceptor circuits?"

            _Oh God, what are perceptors? she thought desperately. Karr came to her rescue._

            "Miss McBride is working on them," he said in his metallic baritone. "I compute ninety-seven percent functionality."

            "Yes," she said gratefully. "I need a little more time."

            "Time, my dear Miss McBride, is one thing we don't have much of," said Knight.

            "Yes sir," she said. "Understood, sir."

            Knight nodded and straightened up, limping away. He held a murmured conference with two or three of the white coats and the guards, and left the lab. Judy sighed with relief. 

            The door of the car—it was grey, she noticed, a dark thunderstorm-grey, not black at all—swung shut, sealing her into the cabin. She bet it was soundproof, and she also bet that he could run his voice just through the cabin speakers rather than the exterior ones, if he wanted. "Pick up a screwdriver and look busy," said Karr in a low and urgent voice. "Something's happened. I heard one of them tell another one about how something in Las Vegas had gone wrong, someone had stumbled onto something they shouldn't have. That was just after they came in and turned on all the lights and started disconnecting me." He coughed again, the lights flickering. "Judy, be careful. Whatever's going to happen is going to happen _soon."_

            She nodded. "I have a feeling I'm not gonna last long around here."

            "Don't say that," Karr told her firmly. "Knight's not all that intelligent. Determined and persistent, but not brilliant."

            "I hope you're right," she sighed, and rested her forehead against the wheel, suddenly aware of how nice it felt to be sitting in a car with him. "I really hope you're right."

            __


	7. Seven!

The Prodigal 7

Disclaimer: Knight Rider, its characters and related indicia are the property of Glen A. Larson. I'm just madly in love with Kitt and Karr, is all. Don't bother suing me. 

**Foundation for Law and Government, ****Las Vegas****, ****Nevada******

            Emily Jones, having been looked at by the FLAG doctors and given a government-subsidized bath and a set of Bonnie's clothes to wear while her own were cleaned, sat in Devon's office and tried to remember the details of her experience. Michael was perched as usual on the edge of Devon's desk—she thought perhaps his aversion to ordinary chairs was something to do with his extra-long legs—and looked at her thoughtfully. 

            "There were two of them," she was saying. "The woman...the receptionist in the front office. Madison. She was wearing this black military-looking coverall thing and she had a gun. A Desert Eagle." She paused and tucked a strand of dark hair behind one ear. "The other one was a man called Davis. I don't remember ever having seen him before. Young, maybe late twenties, darkish hair, square jaw. Looked like a bit-part actor in an 80s crime show.  He was wearing Old Spice..." She trailed off and looked away; Devon raised an eyebrow at Michael and Bonnie.

            "Can you remember anything else, Miss Jones?" he asked.

            "They were talking about 'the boss,'" she said. "Some guy who would kill...the guy who came snooping around. I have to assume that was you, Michael."

            "Yep." Michael folded his arms. "Kitt traced a call made from Frye just after we left the first time, to a man called Garth Knight. That name mean anything to you?"

            "Knight?" Emily frowned. "No. The only Knight I know is you."

            They watched her, thoughtfully. The only expression on her face, besides weariness and the barely repressed shock of her recent experience, was confusion. If she was lying, she was very, very good at it.

            Devon nodded. "Well, Miss Jones," he said. "You'd better stay here at the estate until we can bring this situation to a close. Bonnie will show you to a room."

            Bonnie nodded and got up, leading Emily out of the office and upstairs into the residential section of the mansion. Left alone, Michael and Devon shared a long look. 

            "Well?" Devon said. 

            "We're waiting on the call trace," said Michael. "Kitt's going through every decryption coding he can imagine. When we find it, we're gone. Garth Knight's got something huge in the wings, Devon. Something with MBS."

            Devon sighed. "I know." He looked very far away, and something about the faraway look made Michael pause. 

            "You don't think...."

            "Well, what can it be? I mean, he tried once, with Goliath. Didn't work. Goliath wasn't sentient, couldn't take over once the human driver had failed, couldn't act on his own. He's not stupid, Michael. Not brilliant, but certainly not stupid. Once something's failed, he doesn't try it again without major modifications." Devon ran a hand over his face. "I have to wonder if he's found a different way to achieve his goals."

            "Devon, we _killed_ the KARR. It's dead. It's scattered."

            "Garth Knight was dead too," said Devon, quietly. "Go on, Michael. It won't be long before Kitt finds us an address. And Michael?"

            "Yeah?"

            "Do be careful, won't you? We have no idea what we're up against."

            "Hey," said Michael, with his trademark grin. "It's me, remember?"            

            Devon merely sighed.

**Red****Desert****, outside ****Wingate****, ****Utah**

            Judy, sitting in the back of one of the Omega Tech security cars, watched the desert scroll by outside the windows, and shivered. It was just past dawn; the colours in the distance were lightening from Payne's grey and burgundy through powder-blue to the dusty red she was accustomed to. No one had explained a thing to her: they'd merely extracted her from Karr, bundled her and a basic toolkit, plus laptop, into the security car, and set off in a convoy. If she twisted around she could just make out the first rays of the new sun twinkling from the windscreen of the semi truck behind them, which she had to assume was hauling Karr. 

            She wasn't sure what was going to happen to him, unlike herself; this was the sort of setup one saw in the flashback sections of _CSI_, right before she got yanked out of the car, thrust ignominiously to her knees, and shot through the back of her head. She just hoped Karr would be able to escape from them, when they'd done her. 

            The part of her mind she really hated sometimes, the part that noticed details she didn't want to notice, pointed out helpfully that there were no inside doorhandles in the rear of the security car. No chance for making a break for it: and even if she did manage to get out of the car, where would she go? They were in the middle of the desert. If by some miracle she evaded being shot by Knight's people, she'd die of dehydration and sunstroke anyway. 

            _Thanks, mind. Much appreciated. As if I wasn't already miserable enough. _

            Her gaze fell on the black nylon laptop bag. The driver of the security car wasn't paying attention to her: his eyes were on the road, keeping the car exactly ten miles over the speed limit. A stupid idea flickered into her head as if someone had just turned a Stupid Idea switch on,  and she looked away hurriedly and stared out the window at the distant hills. 

            _That machine's got wireless internet. I know it does: all the Omega comps do. If I could just get a connection for a few minutes....just long enough to send an email...maybe I could let someone know about this. Maybe I could warn someone. Let them know that bad shit is going to go down...that a madman with a sentient car is planning something huge. _

_            Yeah, and who'd believe you? That might fly at _Weekly World News_but no one is going to pay any attention to it in the real world. No one out there would believe this even if they saw it with their own eyes._

_            I wouldn't believe it myself if I hadn't been there when he came online. _

She stared firmly out the window, watching sagebrush blow in the wind of the car's movement, convincing herself. 

            _Ah, what do I have to lose?_

            "Hey," said the driver. "What're you doing back there?"

            She was very glad of the sunglare which was making her squint. "Checking this machine over. The laptops sometimes seize, and I want to make sure there aren't any problems."

            "What?"

            Judy fell back on her knowledge of incomprehensible technicalese. "The switchover from mains to battery power sometimes causes a fatal exception at OE 35.2, which initiates cascade failure in the main metaprocessor logic circuits. I'm just booting it to run DOS Shell setups and make sure there aren't any seizure loops." She was jolly glad her MIT profs hadn't heard that: they'd have beaten her soundly with hanks of USB cable.

            "Uh, right," said the driver, who was a security guard and could probably tell her the minutiae of Nascar specs and the measurements of the current Playboy centerfold but was not exactly a technophile. "Hurry it up."

            "Will do," said Judy, frowning in concentration. _Come on, come on, come on, give me a signal...damned cell towers aren't exactly common in the middle of the desert...._

_            Ah. Thank you, somebody. God of Transmission, perhaps. _She logged on, using one of her forbidden web-based accounts, and typed in a very brief, very terse message, after glancing at the compass on the dashboard and doing some rough calculations.

            _I haven't got anything to lose,_ she thought, and hit _Send_.

            From the air, the convoy resembled a silver bracelet stretched on a narrow ribbon of black velvet, made up of five cars and one semi,  between the wide rust-sand expanse of the playa and the distant humps of the mountains. With choreographed precision, the lead car turned left off the road, pulling the bracelet in a long sweeping curve as the convoy followed; in the dustcloud kicked up by the wheels, the vehicles themselves disappeared, as if they had passed through some strange cloaking field on leaving the highway. When the dust settled, there was no trace of them: the desert had wrapped itself around the cars entirely. No one saw them go; no one noticed they were gone, or where they had gone to. 

            No one was there to see.

tbc


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: I don't own Knight Rider or any of the characters or related indicia thereof. Borrowing for cheap thrills. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed this so far and I hope to have a satisfactory conclusion for you soon.

* * *

The desert stretched out in every direction, red and white and bone-dry under the blazing sun. The convoy of trucks and cars had followed a gap between two outlying spurs of the mountains, red and black instead of red and white. Dust swirled.

Ahead the lead car slowed. Brake light after brake light lit up the dust like a bracelet of rubies. Judy felt cold, colder than ice, deep in the pit of her stomach. Her driver pulled off to the side of the dirt road, following the leader.

There was dead silence for the space of several heartbeats before his dash radio crackled to life. "Unit Six, Unit Six. Bring her up to the semi. With the laptop. No fast moves."

She knew the voice. Not Knight, but one of Knight's close cronies, a bald man called French. He was rumoured, around the Wingate complex, to be a pedophile of the purest ray serene; now he sounded all business. Her driver acknowledged the command, and killed the engine, getting out to open her door and take her by the arm, the laptop bag banging against her hip. She ached—not just with sleeplessness and fear, but also with terror for Karr—for whatever it was that these men had in store for him. By now dying was almost understandable to her, and almost acceptable as well. It had been frightening at first, as they started out, and as they drove through the desert; now it seemed almost natural.

The driver dragged her up the dusty roadside to where men were already swarming around the back of the huge semi-trailer. As she watched, the back gate swung down to form a ramp, and Karr rolled soundlessly down to meet the alkaline road. His shocks bounced gently as he came to a rest, and Judy swallowed a low moan.

"Hey, McBride," said the driver, and squeezed her arm. "You want to tell me what the boss is up to?"

Hearing her name brought Judy back a little. "I…I don't know. He wanted the system brought back online; that's all I'm allowed to say, and really all I know. It's…..I guess this is a field test or something."

He made a non-committal noise, and let loose of her arm; other security personnel were hurrying up to them. One bore a white flight-suit draped over his arm like a sommelier's napkin.

"McBride? Here. Boss wants you to get dressed in this and come with us."

"What…?" she asked. "Why? Does he want me to test-drive the car or something?"

"Not my job to answer questions." The guard's face was blank, his eyes steely. "You want to put this on yourself or am I gonna have to help you?"

She took the suit. It was baggy, made for a man a lot larger than her, and would fit over her regular clothes. There seemed not to be a reason to refuse, and so she unzipped it and stepped into the legs, pulling the suit up around her butt and then her shoulders, shoved her arms through the sleeves. The guard nodded. "Come on. Boss wants you to come with us."

Judy gave her driver and the abandoned laptop bag a glance. It was only half a glance, really, given that the guard grabbed her white-suited arm and dragged her along with him, almost making her fall face-first into the white dust at the side of the road. Any hope she'd had of escaping this place and this undignified little death evaporated with the sweat that stood out on her temples.

Garth Knight stood in his white suit, with his sunglasses winking and heliographing in the early sun, hands crossed on his cane. "Ah, Miss McBride. So glad to see you again; I regret having to wake you so early for this little exercise. We are very grateful for your applied skills."

"…the least I could do, sir. Believe me. I'm glad to help."

"An admirable attitude. Come, Miss McBride. I have a _special_ role in mind for you."

* * *

Karr sat where he had been left on the white hardpan, dust already caking his wheels and quarter panels. He had no idea where he was, only that he was in the desert again, and that the desert was a place of dying, and that the man who had taken him from the desert had nothing good in store for him.

Behind him men in jumpsuits were escorting someone in white out of a car and down from the vestigial road, all the way out into the dried white expanse of the playa itself. Whoever it was looked small and lost in the crowd of men, as lost and out of his element as Karr himself felt out here in this completely alien environment.

Karr's radio lit up suddenly, shaking him on his springs with shock. "Knight Automated Roving Robot, come in. This is Control One."

Part of him—perhaps the part that had spoken to Judy, and enjoyed her touch on his perceptors—wanted to respond flippantly, but he squashed it. "Knight Automated Roving Robot here, Control One. Command?"

"Good," said the voice on the radio, and now he recognized it as Garth Knight's. "Very good. I have a little practical test in mind for you, K.A.R.R." He could almost hear the acronym slotting into visual place, with its appropriate periods; so different from the quiet, kind way Judy said his name. "You will start from your current position and run a course of five miles at top speed northwest across the playa, and then return and negotiate an obstacle course we will have prepared for you. Are you ready?"

Karr paused before replying, the chilly knowledge of Judy's impending death seeping into his CPU like slow water. "Yes, Control One. I am to drive out northwest for five miles at top speed and then return for an obstacle course."

"Excellent. Begin."

Karr lit his engine and gunned it, enjoying that for a moment, the sheer rush of power the turbines lent him, and launched himself across the playa in an acrid cloud of rubber smoke and alkaline dust. He didn't just drive; he _ran_, running like a bat out of hell from the man with the blank blue eyes who had found his bits out in perhaps this very desert, and had him remade to destroy whatever those blue eyes disliked. Ran from his bleak memories of his brother and his past, from his own pain and weariness, from everything other than the need to fly as fast as he could. His wide tires roared, eating up the playa at well over a mile a minute.

When he hit the five-mile mark and turned in a wide screaming arc of dust, he didn't see his target immediately. She was quite a long way away, after all, and he'd kicked up thunderclouds of dust in his run. All he was immediately aware of was the heat of the sun and a darkness ahead, a darkness on the edge of vision, that grew more discrete and clear as he threw himself into high gear and ran for it. By the time his scanners cleared it was very close indeed to being too, too late.

Judy stood with her face turned from him and her hands tied behind her, around a stake driven deep into the dirt. She stood alone: the rest of the men had vanished, but there were jersey walls now on either side of her, narrowing the wide pan of the playa to a single-lane road that led back to the semi and the waiting cars. Beyond her white figure he could make out the forms of Knight and some of his cronies, waiting.

He had eighty feet of road left.

Karr did something he'd never done before: he murmured something like a prayer, even as he flung himself hard left and felt himself swap front and back ends, his still-spinning drive wheels working to cut his momentum, rubber not squealing on this softness, but kicking up blinding, choking clouds of dust. His sensors held the woman firmly in their awareness: he knew, as he approached, sliding, backwards, that if he had calculated even the slightest error she would be nothing more than red pulp from the waist down as he struck her.

Time seemed to slow. There was nothing at all in Karr's world but the friction of his tires and the approaching figure in his sensor screens. She was coming up much too fast—he must have miscalculated—he could hear again her quiet kind voice speaking to him and feel again her fingers on his perceptor, understanding, slow, gentle, and then he had screeched to a halt with his rear bumper barely a foot from her knees, and her eyes were still closed with the awareness of impending death and the men were beginning to run and he had no choices at all left to make.

Karr began to resonate. Playing a note so low it was beyond hearing, he upped the gain on all his speakers as far as it would go and forced the noise up, decibel by decibel, until it hurt even him: the men clutched their stomachs and fell to the ground as the low-frequency vibrations did unpleasant things to their bowels. He let the note rise, fast through the bearable levels, and then through the highest to the most high: the windows of the vehicles waiting blew out one by one in coughing explosions of safetyglass. Karr forced the note higher, focusing his sonic lance on the steel of the cuffs holding Judy to the stake, and higher still, and the cuffs jumped and vibrated and grew burning-hot and shattered.

Judy staggered forward, her burned wrists already blistering, and slumped across his back deck. He cut off the sound with a harsh squeal of feedback. "Judy! Get in!"

The driver's side door clicked open, and she raised a white face, her eyes like holes, and moved like a blind woman to slither inside—feeling her way, her fingers spread and stiff and patting the dusty curves of his side, his windows, his roof. When she fell inside and he knew she was safely in, that door slammed, and before anyone could think to raise a weapon she and Karr were gone.

* * *

He drove like a bat out of hell. More than once he thought his pursuers were catching up—they had tried like hell already to catch him, the big V-8 engines roaring in the desert, but he had effortlessly put on speed and drifted ahead in a cloud of dust. Following their trail had been easy: the convoy had left easily readable dirt-tracks along their way. He drove like the wind for both his sake and Judy's; she lay in his driver's seat, barely conscious, breathing hard even though ten minutes and at least sixty miles lay behind them. By the time he reached the road itself, he was worried.

"Judy? Judy, wake up. Please wake up."

She let her head roll from side to side on the headrest, dizzily. "Kill me. Gonna, gonna kill me. Those eyes, Karr. Like blue holes into nothing. Oh, God the white of the desert and the blue of the sky like his eyes."

"Judy. I'm, I'm…taking us to help. Please, Judy. Don't….don't be afraid. You rescued me. I'm just doing the same."

Her fingers stretched out and slowly, gently traced over the curves of his wheel, and then fell away.


End file.
